Thursday, November 19, 2015

Nov. 19: In Remembrance

During World War Two, Canadians were daily reminded they were fighting for the Five Freedoms. (Actually, these freedoms were from the US constitution, but we were assured they were for all of us.)

They were freedom of religion, of speech, of the press, of the right to assemble peaceably, freedom to petition for redress of grievances.

In the U.S., these freedoms came under attack immediately after the war when U.S. senator McCarthy destroyed lives and careers of at least hundreds by attacking some of these freedoms as "unAmerican". Stephen Harper did the same when he said that it was a "Canadian value" for women to have naked faces.

Freedom of the press? Almost all of it is used by billionaire owners to spin propaganda.

Freedom of religion? Depends on your religion. Oh, you're free to practice it. But that can also automatically set you up for spying by our secret police.

Freedom of speech? Sure. Just watch what you say. If you're an environmentalist, for example, you're probably on a government spying list - and you get reported both to the government and to big business. Ditto for socialists. Ditto for anybody critical of big business.

And I shall never forget the day when I (and others) had to appear before a parliamentary witch hunt because some people had dared to make a film in which they said Canada did some bad things during the war. (The hearing was on Nov. 11, and the walls were covered with thousands of poppies - just to remind us that The Legion (which had demanded these hearings) and the mps and senators (all Conservatives) were the good guys.

Nobody saw the irony of The Legion taking part in an attack on freedom of speech.

We defeated Nazi Germany. And we are becoming Nazi Germany.

Lest We Forget.

Mind you, Britain is worse. It has one surveillance camera for every ten people of population. The British are spied on many, many times a day, all of them, every day.

Hitler was an amateur.
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The Irving press is its usual self. Section A news has a front page story that our restaurants and bars had over a 100 million dollars in sales this summer. I needed to know that.

The dynamite story is hidden on A9. Our government has told us that it will approve shale gas as soon as it determines the regulations needed to protect the land and the groundwater.

Well, it seems not only do they not know of any such regulations, they don't even know how to measure the safety. Science hasn't yet discovered a method to do it. No science. Not anywhere in the world. And the reason they haven't done it is that government will not put up the money for the research.

Funny how Mr. Gallant never mentioned that. But I do congratulate the Irving press for printing this story.
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Editorial and opinion pages can be skipped without loss. Even Alec Bruce has a pretty limp column about the events centre. Apparently, this is were we share a moment and shake hands. I have been to many an "events" centre many times. I can't remember ever shaking hands with anybody, or sharing with anybody except the person I was with. And it means "culture". Yeah. First, nobody knows what a culture is. Secondly, Naziis just loved expressing their "culture" in their 'events centres". This is just blather.
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Section B is still heavy on the Paris shootings. Apparently, the killings in Beirut and Baghdad at the same time really won't matter a damn in comparison to Paris. The American destruction of the whole Middle East doesn't matter. The death of 224 people in a Russian airliner doesn't matter. It's Paris, Paris, Paris - the world centre of culture where the guillotine was invented and was used into the 1970s, the city that happily rounded up Jews for Hitler, and that supplied the torturers and killers in Indo-China and Algeria.

There is not, and never has been any story about the American terrorism of drones that happens every day all over the world. killing nobody knows how many innocent people. Even the American butchering of over a million Iraqis got this intensity of coverage.

We are being set up.

In fairness, B1 has a big story about how Richard Oland's cell phone is still missing. I've been worried about that.

The one story worth reading is on B4. Bombardier, which just got 1.3 billion from Quebec, is now asking Ottawa for money. The amount isn't public - but I have heard it's one to two billion. Will Ottawa come through? You bet. Just look at how many Liberal votes came from Quebec.

That's what I love about capitalism. Daring entrepreneurs of vision and foresight don't just sit on the lawn waiting for their EI payments. No. They risk their own money and work every hour of the day to bring us their best products. And they still have the charity to give some of it to us poor, lazy slobs. God bless them, as we honour them in our Philanthropic Hall of Fame.
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Now, getting back to the real world.....

The New York Times has run a devastating article about how Paris is being used to set us up.

At that, it doesn't tell half the story. We have become fully and more of the police state that Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia were. We are worse because we have no idea where our information is going to besides the government. This is not the Canada our military died for. When the hell is The Legion going to recognize that - and say so? When is it going to demand to know why Canadians were sent to die in Afghanistan?
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Go to google. Type LA Times homeless.

There are 26,000 homeless in Los Angeles City. In the county of Los Angeles, the number rises by 13,000 a month. And those numbers are rapidly being multiplied - not added to - multiplied. Here is story after story of the horror Los Angeles is living through. People were killed in Paris? More are dying every day of exposure, hunger, violence in Los Angeles. They range from the elderly to babies. And it's daily getting worse.

The growth of poverty in the U.S. is astonishing (though it doesn't show in government statistics.) That's what wage gap means. That's what happens when a nation spends its money on a corrupt "defence" industry, one that makes politicians very, very wealthy, politicians whose wealth from corruption makes it impossible to defeat them. That's why the U.S. spends more on "defence" than any other country in the world. That's why its foreign aid consists mostly of weapons.

(A third of all Israelis live in poverty. The U.S. will give Israel five billion in aid in the coming year - all of it in the form of weapons.)

So why has Paris become the only place we hear about? And why don't we hear about Syria, and how a U.S. funded war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and displaced almost 12 million into a world that doesn't want them.

And why don't we hear about where ISIS is getting its money? It costs a lot of money to equip an army (with weapons illegally sold to ISIS by French billionaires). It costs a lot to keep and army in the field, and well-supplied. Some of that money comes from the ability of ISIS to sell oil. It is carried to Turkey by huge convoys of trucks. Lately, and at Russian urging, the U.S. has done some bombing of those convoys.

Why did it take so long? And, obviously, Turkey has been receiving the oil and allowing it to pass through. Gee. Isn't Turkey on our side?

And who's buying it?

It's also well known that Saudi Arabia, another good friend of ours, has been a major donor of money to ISIS. Putin says some G20 members, also our friends, have been donating big money.

As for Paris, we now know that French intelligence knew well in advance of the attacks that they were coming. So how come it didn't act? And was it only a coincidence that the military and emergency services were carrying out excercises that day in the district of the attacks?

Putin says he believes the bombing of a Russian airliner was done by personnel working at the aiport in Egypt. Maybe. And maybe those personnel were helped along by Russian agents posing as jihadists. Maybe this serves Putin's interests by ramping up popular support for his war.

I know this all sounds both brutal and far-fetched. But it's quite common in war. It's called a black flag operation. You create a horror, making it look as though somebody else did it. Or you help them along to do it. In fact, this has become standard proedure, especially since 1900 or so. Sometimes you kill your own people. But that might be a cheap price to set up the resulting war.

Iraq was a simple sort of black flag. Blair and Bush simply lied about terrible weapons that Hussein had. And they killed over million people and destroyed a nation.

Syria is black flag. The U.S. set it up by creating, financing and training a 'rebel' group. The resulting war has killed hundreds of thousands and pretty much destroyed a nation but, hey, that's cheap price to pay so American oil barons can get control.

There were even elements of black flag leading to Pearl Harbour. Roosevelt wanted a war with Japan. He wanted it because the European empires were collapsing, and American capitalists ( sorry, enterpreneurs) wanted to get their turn at looting China - and now China was looting it. But he couldn't say that. He needed an excuse.

So he cut off Japan's supply of oil by imposing an international embargo. Japan had to get that oil. So it bombed Pearl Harbor - not because it intended to invade the U.S. (It knew it couldn't manage that). It bombed Pearl Harbour to cripple the U.S. navy so it wouldn't be able to enforce the embargo.

I'm sure Roosevelt never saw the possibility that Pearl Harbor would be the Japanese response. But his purpose was to create an incident to excuse a war with Japan. And he got it.

Almost everybody in the middle east is fighting for different reasons. And none of them care to admit what their real reasons are. Watch for lots of black flags.

In the word's of Pogo, an old comic strip character, "We have met the enemy. And he is us."

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About Me

born into poverty in Montreal. (1933 was a bad year to be born.) Kicked out of school in grade 11. Became factory hand, office boy.
Did a general BA, mostly at night at Sir George Williams University, and partly while a youth worker for YMCA, camps, etc. Then teacher training at McGill.
Taught gradea 7 to 11 for six years. Loved it.
Quit to do MA at Acadia, then PhD (History) at Queen's.
Taught history three years at UPEI, then some 35 years at Concordia U in Montreal.
Loved the teaching. Thought the profs had more pompous and useless asses among then than is really desirable outside a zoo.
work experience:
factory, office,social group work, office,camp director, teacher.
Radio - c. 3000 broadcasts, mostly current events.
TV - many hundred appearances, mostly commentaries.
Film - some writing, advising, voice-overs.
Writing - no count, some hundreds. Some academic, but mostly for popular market, and ranging from short stories to stories to newspaper and magazine columns to history books.
professional speaker - close to 2000.
Awards for the above? yep